and then package installation. I tried to fix all deleted sof after this package, but not uscced) Mint 9 x64 Gnome on my desktop PC (M2N-E SLI, Athlon 64x2 4000+ =>2.11GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM 600MHz, Palit GTS 250 1GB E-Green), I decide to install a newer LTS Ubuntu 12.04 based distribution - Linux Mint 13! I think my hardware is not the weakest for KDE, but I didn't liked it since I used Mandriva 2007 and 2008 and Kubuntu.I know Mate is the same as Gnome 2 with some differences. Cinnamon is a little different. Xfce (if I'm not wrong) is the fastest and more lightweght than other I heve mentioned.Here are my questions for those who had some experience or gurus on all these and/or other desktop enviroments:1. For higher speed on some applications like games and video edition software is better x64 bit version of a distro. Is it true?2. For a desktop PC like mine, will I feel a difference on speed on some application on those DE (KDE, MATE, Cinnamon or Xfce)?3. There are any cons about using x64 bit Xfce edition of Mint 13?

I know those questions are so strange or even stupid, but an OS for 3 years or more is big period of time! That's why I need a help of a guru in my choice.I'm very grateful in advance for all answers!

Last edited by unixlover0 on Tue Jan 08, 2013 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have a similar system to yours except I have more RAM. I use LM 14 Cinnamon and LM 14 Xfce, 64bit, with no problems and both are fast. My previous computer had 4GB* of RAM and I ran LM 13 Xfce, 32 bit, on that machine nice and quick, too. I'm no expert, but I've read that 64bit works best with at least 4GB RAM.

* corrected

Last edited by Adelante on Mon Jan 07, 2013 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wouldn't install the 64-bit version. With just 2 GiB RAM, stick to 32-bit. The 64-bit version will use more memory for the same task (as the basic data unit uses twice as much memory; making a task use on average about 10%-30% more memory than 32-bit). Yes, 64-bit can and will be a bit faster but only for data crunching applications (like video transcoding, archiving, encrypting, and such). Unless that is what you do most of the day, don't bother with 64-bit in your case. You won't be able to see any speed difference on everyday tasks like browsing the web, writing a document, or sending an email. And 64-bit will be heavier on your system, because you don't have much RAM.

Depending on your graphics card, I'd think Cinnamon or Xfce would feel fastest and use the least amount of memory (for Cinnamon you would have to enable the backports repository; the default Cinnamon 1.4 version on Linux Mint 13 uses too much CPU and RAM, which is dramatically improved by upgrading to Cinnamon 1.6.7 available in the backports repository). However, if you take the time to configure your effects a bit KDE can also be fast I think.

Yep agree as with Cinnamon 14 64bit and when I have a term,nemo & firefox open always at 1-1.3gb used. And grows to 1.6'ish during running additional programs also Firefox tends to eat up more ram as the day progresses.

And on a 2gb system that would start to become a tight setup with more swapping involved starting up more programs to use and slowing down the system some. Can be done but more attention to how many programs running and start to limit how many apps open at any given time.

Easiest solution if possible is add more ram to your setup. Then you can have all choices available and pick for maximum functioning desktop for video,games,etc... .

Thanks to all who answered my questions!In my old distribution - Mint 9 x64 Gnome, I made a 4GB Swap file, but my system were only using about 20% of all swap! Is that normal?How many Swap I would need for my PC? I decided to use as you adviced x32bit edition and Xfce DE. 4GB Swap on my future installation is much, normal or low for my PC (2GB DDR2)? Somewhere I read about a swap size, it needs to be the twice of physical memory. Is that true?How many percent of advantage I will get on 64 bit (system while I'm transcoding a video) instead of 32 bit system? Or the advantage is very low for my weak PC, so I will not see a difference?

For 2 GiB RAM having 4 GiB swap would be fine. Generally you won't need more than 4 GiB swap on a desktop or laptop, except when you want to be able to hibernate (suspend to disk) then you need to make sure you have swap at least equal to amount of RAM (which you have, so no concern for you).

Swap is there for when you need it, which is fine if that isn't so often. By default swap is used quite early, while you still have free memory. That way, when a program suddenly needs a lot of additional memory it is already available. You can also configure it to swap later, when you are closer to using all your memory. That way, your computer will stay fast for a longer period but it will "hiccup" and be slow for a short period when a program suddenly needs a lot of additional memory as it needs to swap first (swap is very slow, memory is very fast). 2 GiB RAM shouldn't be a problem, so I'd recommend you configure swap to be used later. See the steps for that here: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/299. It will make the overall performance a bit better.

@xenopeek Thank you very much for your help!I think now this topic can be closed and marked as solved!

P.S.: So (in conlusion): 1. if I choice Mint 13 x32 Xfce (instead of Mate, Cinnamon or KDE) and a Swap file with 4GB (for my 2GB of physical memory) it will be a good choice? 2. What if later I want to do a little upgrade, change a CPU (change my Athlon 64x2 4000+ to Athlon 64x2 6000+ [3GHz]) and add more RAM (add 1 or 2GB DDR2)? Do I need to re-install a distribution or I need to do some configuration changes?

1. That sounds like a good choice for your current situation.2. If you are getting a CPU and RAM upgrade, you probably won't need to reinstall (mostly any components for which you needed to manually install drivers are the ones that will make you want to reinstall; like if you have an AMD graphics card, or a Broadcom wireless card). However, if you are soon getting a CPU and RAM upgrade you might want try Cinnamon. That should run fine if your machine is a little bit beefier, though it depends also on what graphics card you have.

While you have no more than 4 GiB RAM, I'd recommend sticking to 32-bit install.

My graphic card is Palit GTS 250 1GB DDR3 E-Green (is based on nVidia GeForce GTS 250 chip).I heard about Cinnamon that is not so stable like Xfce. Is that true? Or that was only on first versions of Cinnamon?

You should be fine; I've seen several users running Cinnamon on a GeForce GTS 250. I'd recommend you do enable the backports repository though, if you want to install Linux Mint 13 instead of 14. That way you get the newer version of Cinnamon, and that's running without problems. The steps for that are here: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2225.

Again about 64 bit vs 32 bit. I saw some encoding, editing and booting tests on both "bit" editions of different Linux distributions. The difference on speed and time is very little. I thought it would be bigger...

If you are getting that CPU and RAM soon, I'd say try Linux Mint 13 32-bit Cinnamon but do install the backports to get the newer version of Cinnamon.

If you want you can install 64-bit, that should also go fine. It's just that I tripped over you running Linux Mint 9; then I start thinking about ancient machines and I'm hesitant to recommend 64-bit as it will be using a little bit more memory for each program and so you will be running into swap sooner. With more than 2 GiB RAM that shouldn't be as much of an issue though. I'm just using 919 MiB of RAM right now

Well, thank you for your patient help. For now I'm done with a questions and I'm waiting until Mint 13 32bit finish downloading (because I downloaded first Mint 13 32bit Xfce) and then I will try Cinnamon on my hdd. I hope this time I will not make nothing stupid like on Mint 9, this time I will test my experiments on a virtual machine before doing it on real